Dragon Commander - The End Game, part 1

February 14th, 2013, 17:28

In his personal blog Swen Vincke talks about the upcoming hands-on sessions for Dragon Commander that gaming journalist will be having in the next weeks and the current state of development. Besides that they will also be showing Dragon Commander at the largest LAN party in Belgium.

Whichever it is, we are pretty much in an alea iacta est situation regarding the hands-on thing as the alea was already iacta’d the very day we decided that we were going to be showing Dragon Commander to an audience of a 1000 hardcore gamers at FOM, the biggest LAN party in Belgium, inviting them to come and play Dragon Commander and originally also Original Sin (we’re still deciding about the latter).
If you show it to 1000 hardcore gamers and give them the opportunity to play, you shouldn’t be afraid of letting people from the media play it, yet still, for some reason, that frightens me more than those 1000 players.
It was a mad plan we decided on a long time ago and in truth it should probably have been cancelled in light of the development tasklist but it wasn’t, meaning that impressively, we’re now indeed going to be standing at FOM with something playable, proving yet again that Larian indeed has the planning abilities normally only reserved for those professional companies we hear so much about and ensuring that yet again I will get many invitations from very reputed institutions to lecture on how to plan in a creative environment!

I love it that Swen seems to have managed to get himself into a position where he can proclaim to all the critics who told him his ideas won't work or won't sell to go pound sand. Hopefully this will extend both critically and commercially post-release for Dragon Commander and the next Divinity game.

Publishers are the main reason we've been on a treadmill of endless FPS and action "RPG" games ever since the first 3D graphic cards emerged.

So happy for people like Swen, indie developers, and even kickstarter. All those things are like what the internet did to mainstream news… they are giving people more a different choices.

— If I'm right but there is no wife around to acknowledge it, am I still right?

Experienced players will deal with such a product in a hard but fair way. So thats good if you are confident in your product. Press, on the other hand, you never know. Might be a whole different thing. And one press representative possibly influences more than all those 1000 players.

Though I'm not so sure whether that FOM event is really the right audience.